pulsive, so also is the study of Art in relation to Humanity. It is sad work when we begin to dissect Beauty, but if we look steadily, Beauty we shall find has its Palingenesia. The Poet sways a sceptre over Three Worlds-Truth, Beauty, and Goodness; of these He is the Ministerthe Priest-the Expositor to men; you may define these Worlds to be those of Fact, Form, and Fitness. The first concerns itself with what is, and with all that is, apart from any other consideration; the inquisitive Spirit pries into all the recesses of Being, the most attractive, the most repulsive regions of horror, doleful shades, realms of wild and wondrous Enchantment; common things, common fields and objects, truth concerns herself with them all, and the Poet is interested in whatever is True, or possibly True; the truth of all nature is interesting to the Poet, the intricacies of material nature, the intricacies of moral nature, the recesses, curious and astonishing, of Mind. Beauty concerns herself with what is agreeable in Emotion and Expression, in Object and Conception, and by a very natural movement of the mind, with what is disagreeable too; with the forms most repulsive to the senses; with the features which awaken alarm and terror within the soul; with the sounds that startle, and the sights that appal. While Goodness brings to the eye the fitnesses of things, and their infinite relations, and is found by the mind that can look deepest into the heart of Nature, and then it is found to be the innermost core of all being, the fountain and the spring of being; THE THREE WORLDS. 221 the origin, the impelling principle of all the rest. Beauty lies in the Truth of things, and both in their Goodness. But the Poet should be tried by his relation to all these Worlds; he is a great Poet in the degree in which he Perceives the Truthful, Paints the Beautiful, and Illustrates and Advances the Good. It is a great thing to do this in any World; it is a great thing to do this in the realm of dead Nature, if we dare to speak of Nature as ever dead; but the most truly great Evidence of Power and Strength, is in the Empire over the moral World, in making the Human Spirit the Platform upon which all these shapes of Reality, and Magnificence, and Beneficence, exert their power, and spread their glorious territories of Light and Shade. Hence the Dramatist is the Highest Poet, for he vindicates God within the Human Soul, and the Dramatist who attains to the Highest Power of Art is he who shews the Powers of the Human Spirit most in alliance with Virtue; most potent in subjecting evil passions and ideas to the spell and the mastery of a nature instinctive with the love of Goodness, and therefore alive to every impression of the Beautiful, and responding eagerly to every indication of Truth to Nature-Truth to Moral Nature. This is the Test of the Poet's insight, and his power to make the reader feel that he is in the presence of these, is the surest evidence that he has himself entered those hidden realms and conversed with the purest forms of being. If this then is a fair mode of estimating a Poet, it is very well to enquire in what way is Wordsworth related to these Three Worlds, and it will be instantly perceived how high is his Position in reference to all. He is the Expositor of Truth, especially of Moral Truth; he has a vivid Eye for the perception of all Beauty; and he has furthered the interests of Goodness, not so much by making Goodness the topic of his Enunciations, as by the life of Goodness growing out of all things on which the eye or the heart of the Poet complacently rests. Perhaps the greatest claim which he can put forward to a poetical place is to quote his own language. "The Spirituality with which he has endeavoured to invest the material Universe, and the moral relations under which he has exhibited its most ordinary appearances."* This is the great truth of this Poetry, constituting it a new world of Emotion and Thought; for however deeply this truth has been perceived in all ages and by all poets, it has never been presented so prominently as by Wordsworth; with him the voices and images of Nature become less Analogies than Sentiments-other Poets indeed had found in all the scenery of nature responses to the varying moods of the Human Soul, but it was reserved for Wordsworth to say that "An impulse from a vernal wood, Can teach you more of man, Life, vol. ii. 416. THE TRUE, THE BEAUTIFUL, AND THE GOOD. 223 Can we from the writings of Wordsworth educe and shape out a theory of beauty? We think so; but that theory would never harmonise with the celebrated Essay of Alison, and perhaps the popular exponent of that theory, Lord Jeffrey, might have some dim and half-conscious perception of this, and hence find an instinctive objection to the Poems; in Alison and Jeffrey, Beauty is nothing more than an Art, and Art in its meanest sense of the word. The sense of beauty is an acquisition, and taste is the result of good society, and good eyes. It is clear that this theory entirely ignores all those mysterious and rapturous tinglings along the blood, which come we know not whence nor wherefore. Upon the principle of this theory, the man of the most reflective habit will have the clearest and most vivid perceptions of the beautiful; a statement which we know all observation would deny; we have long thought that this is one of those favorite methods, and instances of attempting to account for essences by exteriors, and so in the end opening wide the portals for mere materialising speculation, and sceptical inference. The whole of Jeffrey's theory of beauty was founded on this idea, and hence his inability to see or sympathise with a deeper world of sentiment and emotion; hence in particular his entire obliviousness to the merits of Wordsworth. Beauty then with our Poet is something within the soul, and within things and objects themselves; and perhaps there is a great half truth in the Essay of half defined relationship; a sense of neighbourhood and nearness; a sense of sympathy with objects in their essences and their forms; it is the acknowledgment within man of his relationship to all nature; it is the variety of all things melted into and in unison with his nature. Alison would reduce it to a mere Memoria Technica; Wordsworth, on the contrary, finds it in the soul and in nature, not merely in memory and in reflection. It is the business of the Poet to be the minister and interpreter of beauty. He must love beauty, he must see beauty, he must feel himself to be a priest, set apart with sacred and consecrated fingers to the unveiling of beauty. This is what makes the name and character of Wordsworth venerable, he saw how all things from the least even to the largest were throbbing with beauty, and he held each object up to the eye; sometimes indeed the beauty was in his own mind; the moral proportions then became confused in their relations with the objects of his verse and his love. But still that was his faith and his vocation, he struck the marble heart that you might see the white of its pure crystal; he held the glass over the sharded insect that you might see the lustre of its shield, and the glorious loveliness of its radiant wings. How different is the life of the Anchorite and of the Missionary. How different the life of the man whose business it is to publish religious truth, and his whose duty it is to contemplate it, from his cell. How different the life of St. Ambrose, or St. Anthony, or St. Ephrem among the rocks whither devotion had carried them, |